Deuteronomy 7:1-26

7  “When your God Jehovah brings you into the country you are going into to take possession of it, and clears out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivvites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and more numerous than you, 2  and your God Jehovah gives them up to your conquest and you defeat them, you shall destroy them without quarter: you shall not make terms with them nor give them grace. 3  Neither shall you intermarry with them: you shall not give his son your daughter nor take his daughter for your son, 4  because he would turn your son from following me and they would worship other gods, and Jehovah would be angry with you and quickly root you out. 5  But this is what you are to do to them: pull down their altars, and break up their obelisks, and chop down their asherahs, and burn off their carvings, 6  because you are a people holy to your God Jehovah: your God Jehovah has chosen you to be a people specially his own out of all the peoples on earth. 7  It was not for your being largest of all peoples that Jehovah took a fancy to you and chose you, for you were the smallest of all peoples; 8  but it was for Jehovah’s love to you, and because he was keeping the oath he had sworn to your fathers, that Jehovah brought you out with strong hand and redeemed you out of the slave-quarters, out of the hands of the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. 9  And you are to know that your God Jehovah is God, the faithful deity who keeps covenant and friendship to a thousand generations toward those who love him and keep his commandments, 10  and repays his hater in person, bringing him to destruction; he will not delay for his hater, he will repay him in person. 11  And you are to keep the commandment, the usages and laws that I am commanding you today to abide by. 12  “And because you listen to these laws and take care to live up to them, your God Jehovah will keep toward you the covenant and friendship that he swore to your fathers, 13  and will love you and bless you and multiply you and bless your fruit of body and your fruit of soil, your grain and your grape-juice and your oil, the propagation of your kine and of your sheep, on the soil he swore to your fathers to give you; 14  you shall be most blessed of all peoples; there shall not be a barren male or female among you nor among your cattle; 15  and Jehovah will keep every disease away from you, and not give you any of the malignant distempers of Egypt that you knew about, but will put them on all your haters. 16  And you shall eat up all the peoples your God Jehovah gives you; your eye shall not have mercy on them, and you shall not worship their gods, because it would be a snare to you. 17  “When you think to yourself ‘These nations are too many for me; how shall I be able to dispossess them?’ 18  you shall not be afraid of them; you shall remember what your God Jehovah did to the Pharaoh and all the Egyptians, 19  the great tests your eyes saw, the tokens and prodigies and the strong hand and outstretched arm wherewith your God Jehovah brought you out; so will your God Jehovah do to all the peoples you are afraid of, 20  and hornets too your God Jehovah will send among them till the survivors that are in hiding from you perish. 21  You shall not stand in awe of them, because you have in your midst your God Jehovah, a great and terrible deity, 22  and your God Jehovah will clear out these nations before you little by little—you shall not be able to make an end of them quickly, for fear the wild beast should multiply against you— 23  and your God Jehovah will give them up to your conquest, and will throw them into utter confusion till they are rooted out. 24  And he will give their kings into your hands, and you shall obliterate their name from under the sky; not a mad shall stand his ground before you until you have rooted them out. 25  The carvings of their gods you shall burn off; you shall not covet silver and gold for them and take it to you, for fear you should be ensnared by it, for it is a thing your God Jehovah abominates. 26  And you shall not bring an abomination into your house, and become deodand like it: you shall disdain it and abominate it, because it is deodand.

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